Oscar-winning special effects veteran Danny Lee has died at the age of 95. The tech expert passed away on 28 November (14) at a care home in Arizona.
The Wisconsin native followed his father, Carl Lee, into the special effects industry and worked as a freelancer on films such as The Ten Commandments, Around the World in Eighty Days and Mary Poppins in the 1950s and 1960s.
He joined Disney Studios in 1969 and took charge of the special effects department for movies including Bedknobs and Broomsticks, for which he won his first Oscar, the original Freaky Friday in 1976 and 1979's The Black Hole, his second Academy Award nomination.
However, Lee was perhaps best known for orchestrating the legendary shoot-out finale for 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the real-life outlaws.
He is widely believed to have been the first special effects man to use synthetic blood capsules and exploding electric devices to depict a bullet entering a body for the sequence, which featured police facing off with the career criminals, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Actress Lee Chamberlin has lost her fight with cancer at the age of 76. The star, who had been living in Paris, France, passed away on 25 May (14) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while visiting her son Matthew.
Born Alverta La Pallo, Chamberlin rose to fame in 1971 as an original cast member of educational children's show The Electric Company, on which she co-starred with Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno and a young Morgan Freeman.
Chamberlin went on to work on the stage, appearing in a 1973 production of Shakespeare's King Lear in New York's Central Park, opposite James Earl Jones as the title character, and she also carved out a career in film, with credits in Sidney Poitier's 1970s movies Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again.
Her other roles included parts on TV comedy series Diff'rent Strokes, police drama Paris and U.S. soap opera All My Children, in which she played Pat Baxter from 1983 to 1995.

Actress Lee Chamberlain has died at the age of 76. Chamberlain passed away while visiting her son in North Carolina last week (ends25May14) following a battle with cancer.
After starting her career on stage, she got her big break appearing on educational kids show The Electric Company alongside stars including Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno from 1971 to 1973.
She went on to appear in TV shows such as What's Happening!!, Diff'rent Strokes, NYPD Blue, and Paris, while her film credits include Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again.
During the 1980s, Chamberlain appeared in U.S. soap opera All My Children and went on to found the Playwrights' Inn Project in her adopted hometown of Paris, France. The scheme aimed to help black playwrights develop their work.

AMC
Mad Men is not long for this world. To add insult to injury, it will be an entire year before you get to see the end of the final season. But if you're a fan of the mega-hit about 1960s advertisers, you are bound to have seen promos for AMC’s new series Halt and Catch Fire. This recent addition to the network seems like the perfect fit to fill the void. It follows the bad boys of the early 1980s computer industry. It offers the same blend of businessmen with mysterious motives, dark self-destructive tendencies, and nostalgia, all without feeling like a cheap carbon copy. Plus, the cast is pretty awesome.
Lee Pace: The New Don Draper
Pace plays Joe MacMillan, a former IBM employee with a secret. He comes to Texas with a mission and a bunch of ideas. He’s the driving force behind a plan to reverse engineer an IBM computer. Pace was memorable as the lovable pie-maker in Pushing Daisies. He’s also been a part of quite a few recent franchises including Twilight, The Hobbit films, as well as the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy. His enigmatic character is sexy, smart, and has that same dark Draper vibe.
More Depressed than Pete Campbell
Scoot McNairy plays Gordon Clarke, a family man whose wife is doing better in the computing game than he is. The couple is licking their wounds after trying to build their own machine. Like Mad Men’s Pete Campbell, Gordon is struggling to make his mark in the industry while providing for his family. However, the 1980s brings the added pressure of having a wife as a potential competitor. He's an ambitious idealist and a depressive pushover. McNairy is nearly unrecognizable with his geek makeover. He's recently starred in Non-Stop and Argo.
Post-Modern Punky Peggy Olsen
Mackenzie Davis plays androgynous engineering prodigy Cameron Howe. She and Joe have a will they/won’t they chemistry. Like Peggy, she butts heads with Joe and challenges his authority, and in true punk style, all authority. She’s a fish out of water at the Cardiff Electric but she is everyone’s only hope. She also seamlessly enters the "boy's club." She played Chelsea, Miles Teller's love interest in That Awkward Moment.
The nice thing about the series is it isn’t just a re-skinned version of Mad Men. It definitely has the potential to provide the same tune-in appeal with a completely new take on the pretty dry world of computers. And yet, given its impact on our society the computer was a major source of contention, innovation, and success. The series also has elements of the heist film genre. Joe is either a major mastermind or completely insane. He seems to have elaborate plans or no sense of self-preservation. There is also a lot of elements inherent to the 1980s that can be explored over the course of the series, including the hardcore push of capitalism, the rise in cocaine use, and the rampant bed-hopping before the AIDS crisis. Either way, the show looks primed to deliver something very special. You can catch the first episode early on the AMC Tumblr Page.
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Marvel/Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube
A wave of geek pride swept popular culture sometime in the latter half of the past decade — regrettably, long after many of us really needed it (damn those high school years). We've seen the phenomenon unfold in the form of Lucasfilm buzz, Star Trek reboots, and (most notably) the Marvel Universe on the big screen. Comic book devotees were not only seeing their favorite stories and characters take faithful shape in Disney's behemoth film franchise, but were sharing this love, for the first time, with everyone else. The mainstream.
As a subtle form of counterculture against an existing blockbuster fare so devoid of brains and heart that it bordered on nihilism, Hollywood grabbed for the passion that so many comic fans had been thriving on just below the scope of public awareness. Studios stumbled upon the pure gold that had been funding comic fandom for years, enlisting not those who might dilute the nerd lexicon with accessibility, but bona fide fluent-speakers to translate the language to the big screen: Joss Whedon, Matthew Vaughn, Joe Johnston, and the like. And the result wasn't an alienation of the American majority, but its integration with the flavorful subculture that had for so long offered shelter to those otherwise homeless. At last, being one of these long ostracized few was the key to popular authority. Encyclopedic knowledge about S.H.I.E.L.D., Asgard, and the Extremis virus became a bejewled anchor that'd dock you a coveted spot in any party conversation. Being a geek — historied, analytical, and didactic about these precious worlds — was finally in. So that would make it the perfect time to launch one of the Marvel Comics world's more obscure (at least compared to Iron Man) properties, Guardians of the Galaxy.
A film version of the Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning creation was first mentioned as a possibility back in 2010, ascending to the altogether surprising, exciting, and worrisome green light platform two years later, breaking public via an announcement at 2012's San Diego Comic-Con. We had only a few months prior seen The Avengers sock the American people with a regime of jingoistic solidarity that you'd ordinarily need a national tragedy to instill, but apprehensions remained: could Marvel Studios — yes, even that very Marvel Studios — get geeky enough for this wacko publication? But we might not have been asking the right question. A year and a half later, we have our first authentic taste of what the suits at Disney and their latest on-lot artisan James Gunn are offering with Guardians of the Galaxy. The trailer came forth via the good graces of Tuesday night's Jimmy Kimmel Live! (on the Mouse-handled network ABC), hitting the Internet moments later and eliciting every conceivable response from the Twittersphere: looks great, looks dumb, looks fun, looks weird, looks like magic, looks like trash, looks too... too...
"Geeky" wouldn't be the right word — far from it — though no one could claim that this seemed like your average blockbuster. Its hero, a sitcom star with a new vault-load of Lego Movie money (Chris Pratt), humorously laments the meager scale of his reputation and doles out the bird without reservation. Its second-in-commands are a cool-handed assassin (Zoe Saldana) and a shirtless bulge on a perpetual revenge quest (Dave Bautista). And then there's a raccoon and a tree (the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, respectively). A gallery of rejects, introduced by John C. Reilly and a disapproving Peter Serafinowicz all in perfect tempo with an action montage and the musical stylings of Blue Swede. It's all pretty f**king gosh darn ridiculous, as such bound to ordain contesters: the vein-deep geeks so rigidly affixed to the spirited but sincere masterworks of Stan Lee, the Avengers franchise fans confused by the apparent shift in the comic book movie machine's gears. But just as Phase I came about as an act of defiance to the stoic norm, Guardians seems to be speaking on behalf of its own breed of second-class citizen. A legion from the social culture underbelly with even less claim to fertile territory than the geeks had. This is the beginning of a new wave for dork culture.
Marvel/Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube
Call it semantics, but you'll just be proving how estranged you are from each locale (although despite what the message boards tell you, there's no shame in not being any kind of nerd). Where the geeks are proud members of a long oppressed and unappreciated kingdom, dorks are more "man without a country" types. Perhaps more accurately identified as schmoes, goons, oddballs, outcasts, dinks, freaks, or (if you want to stick with the classics) weirdos, those in the dork variety don't boast the benefits of a grounded underworld, nor a bible to which they might adhere. The dorks — proverbial loners — have only themselves. Their intellect, their sense of humor. Where many geeks stray to science fiction and fantasy, dorks stray to comedy, a medium as readily conducive to inward speculation and innovation as the comic book scene's is to outward. As such, with action and adventure laying claim to the most popular of the cinematic world's genres (and no traditionally unified voice, by nature), it's been hard for the dorks to really get their blockbuster out there. But Guardians of the Galaxy looks like it, in a number of ways.
First, this is a movie about dorks, not geeks. Although The Avengers saw a spat of dissimilar heroes coming together for the greater good, that central conceit is what identifies them as members of the geek class. Separately or together, they're all part of something larger than themselves: justice. An element that is often shunned and cast away by the powers that be, but that holds strong and electric beneath the surface until inevitably erupting with righteous power. In Guardians, we have a collection of criminals. Vandals, renegades, murderers. People (and aliens, and rodents, and trees) whose only unifying quality seems to be strength in numbers, or maybe just a distaste for the very idea of authority. That doesn't mean we won't root for 'em, but you can bet it won't be the same old band-of-brothers story that we saw back in May '12.
On the same token, not a one of them seems to belong anywhere. Again, we compare with the Avengers crew: Steve Rogers reigned supreme in the WWII-era American Army, Tony Stark was the Steve Jobs of his own electronics industry, Thor staked claim to a literal throne back in Asgard. But look at the Guardians: Drax the Destroyer (Bautista) lost his planet and family, Gamora (Saldana) abandons her evil upbringing in favor of an existential (albeit still quite violent) journey, nobody's heard of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill (Pratt), and... again, do we even have to say anything about the raccoon and the tree? As Serafinowicz harumphs in the trailer, this team doesn't come off as your motley band of underdog heroes. They look like "a bunch of a-holes." (Hey, maybe that's the new subculture that Guardians is aiming for.)
Marvel/Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube
Second, this is a movie for dorks. Not only is it championing the agenda of these walking, shooting, and tree-ing bags of nonsense, it's doing so with the attitude that a dork approaches his or her every thought with. Sure, The Avengers was funny — and irreverent, no doubt — but it was sincere. Genuine all the way through in everything it shepherded from source to script to screen. Guardians, as much as we can tell so far, is an explosion in goofiness. It introduces its central hero with a joke — not only at his expense, but at that of the movie itself. It undermines its own severity over and over, with cursing intergalactic agents, an eruption of '70s pop music, and a destruction of all the principles on which the ideas of traditional heroism are founded. Logically speaking, it doesn't seem like we're supposed to root for or believe in these dinguses. They don't have the inherent nobility of your geek heroes — the moral fiber that stems from a grounding in worlds of tribalistic fantasy. These guys are free agents, and the movie looks like it is embracing that in its delivery of character, story, ambiance, and comedy. And that last one is the most important indicator here. Geek culture is riddled with fun, but takes its staples very seriously. There's no room for that when you're talking about dorks.
So why now? Why is a dork movement on the rise as a counter to the very uprising that dissipated mainstream nihilism? Really, its a breakdown of subcultures altogether... or a step toward this notion. Geek culture came about to usher in a "different" group. Movies had long spoken to a specific populace, ignoring the creative, deserving, eager collections of comic book aficionados. Geek culture gave rise to the Second World. But dork culture is the Third World, or maybe no World at all. The dork wave is about true individualism. No adherence to any cultural law above survivalism. Where the geeks spent decades building speakeasy churches in which to decree their gods and psalms sanct — quietly, lest the ruling classes catch wind of this heresy — the dorks have been working corners for a bite to eat, not buying into the political reign or to the defiant uprisings. Not worrying about (or successfully abetting the demands of) what demanded of either the mainstream or the geeky, just looking for the things that made them laugh, feel, and think.
They haven't been looking for a band with which to take up — as if they'd be welcome into one if they had — reveling instead in inimitability... not without a healthy sum of self-loathing, mind you (again, damn those high school years). Throughout, they knew, or hoped, that they had something figured out. That someday, past the downfall of the mainstream, past the uprise of geek culture, they'd get to tell their story on the biggest screens imaginable. And it all starts here. Crank the ooga chakas.
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Summit via Everett Collection
You can imagine that Renny Harlin, director and one quadrant of the writing team for The Legend of Hercules, began his pitch as such: We'll start with a war, because lots of these things start with wars. It feels like this was the principal maxim behind a good deal of the creative choices in this latest update of the Ancient Greek myth. There are always horse riding scenes. There are generally arena battles. There are CGI lions, when you can afford 'em. Oh, and you've got to have a romantic couple canoodling at the base of a waterfall. Weaving them all together cohesively would be a waste of time — just let the common threads take form in a remarkably shouldered Kellan Lutz and action sequences that transubstantiate abjectly to and fro slow-motion.
But pervading through Lutz's shirtless smirks and accent continuity that calls envy from Johnny Depp's Alice in Wonderland performance is the obtrusive lack of thought that went into this picture. A proverbial grab bag of "the basics" of the classic epic genre, The Legend of Hercules boasts familiarity over originality. So much so that the filmmakers didn't stop at Hercules mythology... they barely started with it, in fact. There's more Jesus Christ in the character than there is the Ancient Greek demigod, with no lack of Gladiator to keep things moreover relevant. But even more outrageous than the void of imagination in the construct of Hercules' world is its script — a piece so comically dim, thin, and idiotic that you will laugh. So we can't exactly say this is a totally joyless time at the movies.
Summit via Everett Collection
Surrounding Hercules, a character whose arc takes him from being a nice enough strong dude to a nice enough strong dude who kills people and finally owns up to his fate — "Okay, fine, yes, I guess I'm a god" — are a legion of characters whose makeup and motivations are instituted in their opening scenes and never change thereafter. His de facto stepdad, the teeth-baring King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins), despises the boy for being a living tribute to his supernatural cuckolding; his half-brother Iphicles (Liam Garrigan) is the archetypical scheming, neutered, jealous brother figure right down to the facial scar. The dialogue this family of mongoloids tosses around is stunningly brainless, ditto their character beats. Hercules can't understand how a mystical stranger knows his identity, even though he just moments ago exited a packed coliseum chanting his name. Iphicles defies villainy and menace when he threatens his betrothed Hebe (Gaia Weiss), long in love with Hercules, with the terrible fate of "accepting [him] and loving [their] children equally!" And the dad... jeez, that guy must really be proud of his teeth.
With no artistic feat successfully accomplished (or even braved, really) by this movie, we can at the very least call it inoffensive. There is nothing in The Legend of Hercules with which to take issue beyond its dismal intellect, and in a genre especially prone to regressive activity, this is a noteworthy triumph. But you might not have enough energy by the end to award The Legend of Hercules with this superlative. Either because you'll have laughed yourself into a coma at the film's idiocy, or because you'll have lost all strength trying to fend it off.
1/5
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Late music legend Lou Reed will be remembered at a tribute show in New York City on Sunday (24Nov13). The concert, which will be held at Manhattan's Bowery Electric, will feature members of The Vaccines, Patti Smith Band guitarist Lenny Kaye, Reed's former collaborator Shahzad Ismaily and rockers Hollis Brown, who will perform the Velvet Undergound's 1970 record Loaded in its entirety.
Proceeds from the gig, titled Last Great American Whale: A Concert in Memory of Lou Reed, will go to the Ali Forney Center, a charity which helps the homeless.
Reed died last month (Oct13) at the age of 71.

Lions Gate via Everett Collection
When we last left our heroes, they had conquered all opponents in the 74th Annual Hunger Games, returned home to their newly refurbished living quarters in District 12, and fallen haplessly to the cannibalism of PTSD. And now we're back! Hitching our wagons once again to laconic Katniss Everdeen and her sweet-natured, just-for-the-camera boyfriend Peeta Mellark as they gear up for a second go at the Capitol's killing fields.
But hold your horses — there's a good hour and a half before we step back into the arena. However, the time spent with Katniss and Peeta before the announcement that they'll be competing again for the ceremonial Quarter Quell does not drag. In fact, it's got some of the film franchise's most interesting commentary about celebrity, reality television, and the media so far, well outweighing the merit of The Hunger Games' satire on the subject matter by having Katniss struggle with her responsibilities as Panem's idol. Does she abide by the command of status quo, delighting in the public's applause for her and keeping them complacently saturated with her smiles and curtsies? Or does Katniss hold three fingers high in opposition to the machine into which she has been thrown? It's a quarrel that the real Jennifer Lawrence would handle with a castigation of the media and a joke about sandwiches, or something... but her stakes are, admittedly, much lower. Harvey Weinstein isn't threatening to kill her secret boyfriend.
Through this chapter, Katniss also grapples with a more personal warfare: her devotion to Gale (despite her inability to commit to the idea of love) and her family, her complicated, moralistic affection for Peeta, her remorse over losing Rue, and her agonizing desire to flee the eye of the public and the Capitol. Oftentimes, Katniss' depression and guilty conscience transcends the bounds of sappy. Her soap opera scenes with a soot-covered Gale really push the limits, saved if only by the undeniable grace and charisma of star Lawrence at every step along the way of this film. So it's sappy, but never too sappy.
In fact, Catching Fire is a masterpiece of pushing limits as far as they'll extend before the point of diminishing returns. Director Francis Lawrence maintains an ambiance that lends to emotional investment but never imposes too much realism as to drip into territories of grit. All of Catching Fire lives in a dreamlike state, a stark contrast to Hunger Games' guttural, grimacing quality that robbed it of the life force Suzanne Collins pumped into her first novel.
Once we get to the thunderdome, our engines are effectively revved for the "fun part." Katniss, Peeta, and their array of allies and enemies traverse a nightmare course that seems perfectly suited for a videogame spin-off. At this point, we've spent just enough time with the secondary characters to grow a bit fond of them — deliberately obnoxious Finnick, jarringly provocative Johanna, offbeat geeks Beedee and Wiress — but not quite enough to dissolve the mystery surrounding any of them or their true intentions (which become more and more enigmatic as the film progresses). We only need adhere to Katniss and Peeta once tossed in the pit of doom that is the 75th Hunger Games arena, but finding real characters in the other tributes makes for a far more fun round of extreme manhunt.
But Catching Fire doesn't vie for anything particularly grand. It entertains and engages, having fun with and anchoring weight to its characters and circumstances, but stays within the expected confines of what a Hunger Games movie can be. It's a good one, but without shooting for succinctly interesting or surprising work with Katniss and her relationships or taking a stab at anything but the obvious in terms of sending up the militant tyrannical autocracy, it never even closes in on the possibility of being a great one.
3.5/5
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Actor Judd Hirsch's neighbours are urging him to reconsider his plans to install a wind-turbine electric generator on his New York property over fears the machine will ruin the scenic area. The Independence Day star is looking to reduce his energy costs for his home and believes the turbine is his best option.
However, his neighbours are worried the towering blades and sounds from the installment will ruin the serene environment of the Catskills area.
Resident Richard Benkwitt says, "I bought property up there, built a house, because it's beautiful... (It) would ruin the beauty of the location. Once you put it up, you can't take it back."
However, Hirsch insists his neighbours' complaints are out of jealousy and not about preserving the quiet environment.
He tells The New York Times, "Their fears, in my estimation, are baloney. Behind it, I believe, is the pollution of jealousy and the pollution of stupidity.
"This one annoys the hell out of me because these people are making up stories that don't have any relevance to anything in this world. You can't hear it, and it can't harm you, and you can't see it, and if you did it would be beautiful."
If Hirsch moves forward with the plans, the turbine would be the first in the area and would cost him $132,000 (£88,000) to build.

Getty/Michael Ochs Archives
Duane Allman left us 42 years ago this week, and while he's remembered as one of rock's greatest guitar stylists -- not to mention one of its greatest tragedies, felled by a motorcycle mishap when he was just 24 -- his whole story is seldom told. The release of the seven-disc box set Skydog: The Duane Allman Retrospective goes a long way towards addressing that issue. Over its vast expanse, besides a crucial handful of tracks from the guitar hero's best-known affiliations, The Allman Brothers Band and Derek &amp; The Dominos, it offers a stunning array of other projects Allman contributed to in his woefully brief lifetime. From Allman's pre-ABB groups to his far-ranging session work, this rich piece of American musical history encompasses every aspect of the six-string sultan's output, often venturing into corners previously familiar only to hardcore aficionados, and definitively displaying the multiple musical personalities of a rock &amp; roll icon. Here are just a few of the unexpected roles in which you'll find Allman over the course of this revelatory collection.
The Garage Rocker: "Gotta Get Away" by The Allman Joys
Here's Duane in full fuzztone mode, ripping into a raw-boned rocker with the mid-'60s band he and brother Gregg fronted.
The Psychedelic Soldier: "Norwegian Wood" by The Hour Glass
After The Allman Joys came late-'60s outfit the Hour Glass, who weren't above venturing into some serious psychedelic territory, as shown by Duane's deft manipulation of an electric sitar on this ambitious Beatles cover.
The Muscle Shoals Soul Man: "Hey Jude" by Wilson Pickett
Speaking of ambitious Beatles covers, before finding fame as a blues-rocking firebrand with The Allman Brothers Band, Duane found another kind of Fame: recording with tons of top-shelf soul singers at Muscle Shoals, Alabama's legendary Fame Studio. "Wicked" Pickett's Fab Four takeover is one of many awe-inspiring examples of Allman's Muscle Shoals tenure included here.
The Session Star: "Beads of Sweat" by Laura Nyro
Even after The Allman Brothers Band's ascendance, Duane continued following his muse far and wide, bringing his guitar prowess to all manner of sessions. Here he joins some of his Muscle Shoals comrades on a trip to New York to back the sophisticated song-poetry of Laura Nyro on an album that also included everyone from jazzman Joe Farrell to Rascals frontman Felix Cavaliere.
The Jazz-Funk Jam Master: "Push Push" by Herbie Mann
Anyone who's heard some of The Allman Brothers Band's epic jams knows that Duane doesn't need a script to follow. Here he chases jazz flute giant Herbie Mann across a 10-minute track full of juicy, jazzy jamming.
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